"We said: 'This system will always go on. We needn't bother
about it.' We just planned our lives accordingly. It was like
a bird building its nest of frozen snakes. My father left me
a decent independence. I developed my position; I have lived
between here and the hospital, doing good work, enormously
interested, prosperous, mildly distinguished. I had been born
and brought up on the good ship Civilization. I assumed that
someone else was steering the ship all right. I never knew; I
never enquired."
"Nor did I" said Sir Richmond, "but--"
"And nobody was steering the ship," the doctor went on.
"Nobody had ever steered the ship. It was adrift."
"I realized that. I--"
"It is a new realization. Always hitherto men have lived by
faith--as children do, as the animals do. At the back of the
healthy mind, human or animal, has been this persuasion:
'This is all right. This will go on. If I keep the rule, if I
do so and so, all will be well. I need not trouble further;
things are cared for.'"
"If we could go on like that!" said Sir Richmond.
"We can't. That faith is dead. The war--and the peace--have
killed it."
The doctor's round face became speculative. His resemblance
to the full moon increased. He seemed to gaze at remote
things. "It may very well be that man is no more capable of
living out of that atmosphere of assurance than a tadpole is
of living out of water. His mental existence may be
conditional on that. Deprived of it he may become incapable
of sustained social life. He may become frantically self-seeking--incoherent
. . . a stampede. . . . Human sanity
may--DISPERSE.
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